Friday, March 30, 2012

Over the past few days, a
few literary bloggers (you know who you are) have been discussing what
constitutes a “classic” and how the “canon” is formed: in other words, how
literature comes to be valued collectively. Amateur Reader of Wuthering Expectations generously (and humorously) offers that “a
classic is whatever other people say it is, and also whatever you say it is.” It’s that second category of valuation that
interests me here: each reader’s “personal” canon, those works he or she might
carry along to a desert island. When the “classics/canon” discussion arose, I’d
just been musing about that topic in a tangential context.

On a less than 24-hour passage
through London recently, I spent one of those rare travel days when everything clicked,
the whole day an enchaînement of
enchantments. I spent some time in second-hand bookshops, emerging both
relieved (no more books to cram into my bags) and disappointed (no more books
to cram into my bags). The shops seemed ransacked; I found nothing I was
seeking, nor anything I wasn’t. But heading back to my hotel in the remains of
the day, I noticed a bookshop I’d missed earlier, like the others not clean,
not well-lighted, bereft of all but the most forlorn books. But suddenly I
spied a pristine Folio Society edition of William Stanley Moss’ Ill Met By
Moonlight, a work I’d wanted to read since learning of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s
role in the tale it recounts. For the few British coins remaining in my pocket,
it was mine.

Some books seem to leave
one reluctant to the risk tarnishing the singular power of their storytelling by
something so superfluous, mingy and indecorous as critical commentary (a few that
come to mind: Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Antoine
Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes).
Ill Met By Moonlight, Moss’ log of his and Fermor’s daring 1943
kidnapping, with the help of local partisans, of the Nazi general overseeing
the occupation of Crete, fits this mold. It’s a supremely absorbing adventure
tale. I read it in a single sitting, finishing in the jet-lagged wee hours of
the morning. I wish to add or subtract nothing from its mesmerizing story, but one
marginal, bookish element snagged my attention.

I’d found this notable
elsewhere, even in Fermor’s own travel books: the supreme importance, on a
personal level, given to literature, to the point of hauling it around as a
travel accessory (necessity, more like). Reading Robert Byron’s The Road to
Oxiana, an account of his travels in the 1930’s through Persia and
Afghanistan, I couldn’t help but notice the number of books Byron brought along.
Byron’s library for his punishing travels – not exactly beach reading -
included Proust, Boswell, Thucydides and some detective novels, as though he
were toting along a whole civilization, like a talisman to prevent him from
losing himself in foreign lands. In a less cumbrous example of literature as
travel necessity, Antonio Tabucchi, writing about Miguel de Unamuno, notes that
when exiled to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, Unamuno insisted on taking
along the New Testament, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the Canti of
Giacomo Leopardi. Certainly there are hundreds of other such lists.

But finding this same
phenomenon in Ill Met By Moonlight raised an eyebrow. Unlike Byron, off
on a self-initiated grand cultural adventure, and unlike Unanmuno, fleeing into
indeterminate exile, Moss and Fermor were on a clandestine, highly dangerous war-time
mission, involving night travel on precarious goat paths, hiding in caves and ditches,
evading German patrols and myriad other perils. Nonetheless, writing in a
canyon after a long night’s rugged march several days after his secret
disembarkation on Crete, Moss reveals:

I
have with me the books which Paddy and I selected in Cairo to take with us, and
among them there is something to suit every mood. My literary companions are
Cellini, Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Tolstoi, and Marco Polo, while in lighter
vein there are Les Fleurs du Mal, Les Yeux d’Elsa, and Alice in Wonderland. Then there are The Oxford Book of Verse and the
collected Shakespeare which Billy MacLean gave us on our last night in
Tara…smiling shyly and giving us these two volumes, one to Paddy, one to me,
saying that they had been with him in Albania and would surely bring us luck.

What a commitment to
literature! What an almost superstitious faith in its power! This attitude is underscored
by the role that literature and poetry play in the mission itself, as when the
young Fermor completes in Latin some lines from Horace that the kidnapped German
general has begun to mutter, or in the numerous poems and songs recited by the
Cretans and Brits alike to provide solace, courage and sustenance.

But it’s not as though hauling
around a load of literature is restricted to those on grand explorations,
perilous missions or trips into exile. After all, on my fortuitous London evening,
Ill Met By Moonlight joined 18 other books I’d already picked up during
two weeks of travel. I wonder, though, which books I’d bring along on a voyage
if I knew there was a more than significant chance I wouldn’t come back. The
canon formed by what other people think is a classic is certainly not something
I dismiss; I suspect, though, that it wouldn’t be the first place I’d turn to
make my choices for this journey.